12/21/2009 @ 6:00PM

Best Sports Books Of 2009

The Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridien, says, ”Men are born for games … Every child knows that play is nobler than work.” It is perhaps the best explanation for humanity’s global obsession with playing and watching sports.

Thank God, then, for the great sportswriters; men and women who justify this love and somehow even manage to amplify it by providing meaning and context. The motives, the heroes and villains, the hope and despair, the humanity–great writers unravel and examine it all. They even get non-sports folks interested, which is no mean feat.

At times, sports writing has been unfairly maligned as a literary backwater. But some of our greatest scribblers have written–and written well–about sports. Think of Ernest Hemingway on boxing and bullfighting, John Hawkes on horse racing, Susan Orlean on high school basketball, Gay Talese on Joe DiMaggio and Michael Lewis on football lineman.

And with the lines between our games and players and ”real” life becoming increasingly blurred (hello, Tiger Woods), stories about sports have only become more powerful and compelling.

2009 was a banner year for books about sports. Our roundup of the 10 best–cobbled together with the help of book editors and literary agents–detail the lives, obsessions, triumphs and defeats of players of tennis, poker and soccer, of fishermen and boxers, and run the gamut from biographies to autobiographies, comebacks and Bible-sized tomes.

What they all share though, is a compelling human narrative anchored by the games people play.

The tennis superstar opens up about his life and career. The at-times brutal honesty, of his distaste for the sport, his rise and fall and rise again on the court, makes for a compelling story. It may be one of the best sports autobiographies ever written.

ESPN’s uber-blogger pens an engrossing, 700-page basketball Bible full of witty insight and humor. Written from a fan’s perspective–opinionated, outlandish, worshipful and exasperated–Simmons’ book is the perfect sports tome for our times.

The moving story of a soccer program made up of child refugees in a small, stubborn Southern town that becomes their home and the strong-willed coach who brings them all together. St. John’s book is about sports, sociology, global politics, war and the age-old American story of immigration.

The first true biography of Satchel Paige, the Negro League baseball star who Tye believes may have been one of the best pitchers in history. Tye shatters a few of the Paige myths, but the man who emerges is perhaps an even more charismatic baseball player who, until now, has never received the recognition he deserved.

With a visit to a tribe of the best distance runners on earth, McDougall opens up a whole new world on the sport of running. The Mexican tribe, which treats running like an artistic endeavor as opposed to a painful method of exercise, makes McDougall realize that everything we know about running is wrong.

McManus on the history and contemporary importance of what he deems the ”national card game.” It’s an engaging follow-up to his 2003 bestseller, Positively Fifth Street, about his experience playing in the World Series of Poker and simultaneously reporting on the murder trial of Las Vegas casino icon Ted Binion.

A rollicking account of the annual striped bass and bluefish derby on Martha’s Vineyard, spiked with the you-are-there view of the beauty, folly and humanity of the participants. Kinney follows some of the most intriguing personalities, does a bit of fishing and documents the at-times tricky relationship between the blue-collar derby participants and the well-to-do seasonal residents of the island.

A photo journal of Armstrong’s 2009 pro cycling comeback, illustrated beautifully by photographer Elizabeth Kreutz’s stunning, behind-the-scenes shots. The book documents Armstrong’s journey from deciding to return to cycling after a three-year absence, through his harrowing crash in Spain and his near-triumph at the Tour de France.

A story of race, history and a forgotten champion who may have been, pound-for-pound, the best boxer who ever lived. Robinson was a man who carried himself with grace and sophistication in the age of the Harlem Renaissance. But he was a terror in the ring, especially in his six bouts with Jake LaMotta.

The thrilling match between the German Gottried Von Cramm and American Don Budge (who was coached by the irrepressible Bill Tilden) in the 1937 Davis Cup final becomes a metaphor for a nervous world on the verge of a horrific war. Through Cramm, we see Germany succumbing to evil; through Budge and Tilden, we see another country on the rise.